Chapter 2

"But he's so bitter against Jack," replied Pauline. "He won't listen to his side--to our side--of it."

"Anyhow, what's the use of anticipating trouble? You wouldn't get married yet. And if he's worthwhile he'll wait."

Pauline had been even gentler than her own judgment in painting her lover for her cousin's inspection. So, she could not explain to her why there was necessity for haste, could not confess her conviction that every month he lived away from her was a month of peril to him.

"We want it settled," she said evasively.

"I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he here now?"

"He's in Chicago--in charge of his father's office there. He may stay all winter."

"No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from experience--she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when, going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider view.

But Pauline scorned this theory; if Olivia had confessed the broken engagement she would have thought her shallow and untrustworthy. She was confident, with inexperience's sublime incapacity for self-doubt, that in all the wide world there was only one man whom she could have loved or could love.

"Oh, I shan't change," she said in a tone that warned her cousin against discussion.

"At any rate," replied Olivia, "a little experience would do you no harm." She suddenly sat up in bed. "A splendid idea!" she exclaimed. "Why not come to Battle Field with me?"

"I'd like it," said Pauline, always eager for self-improvement and roused by Olivia's stories of her college experiences. "But father'd never let me go to Battle Field College."

"Battle Field UNIVERSITY," corrected Olivia. "It has classical courses and scientific courses and a preparatory school--and a military department for men and a music department for women. And it's going to have lots and lots of real university schools--when it gets the money. And there's a healthy, middle-aged wagon-maker who's said to be thinking of leaving it a million or so--if he should ever die and if they should change its name to his."

"But it's coeducation, isn't it? Father would never consent. It was all mother could do to persuade him to let me go to public school."

"But maybe he'd let you go with me, where he wouldn't let you go all alone."

And so it turned out. Colonel Gardiner, anxious to get his daughter away from Saint X and into new scenes where Dumont might grow dim, consented as soon as Olivia explained her plan.

Instead of entering "senior prep", Pauline was able to make freshman with only three conditions. In the first week she was initiated into Olivia's fraternity, the Kappa Alpha Kappa, joined the woman's literary and debating society, and was fascinated and absorbed by crowding new events, associations, occupations, thoughts. In spite of herself her old-time high spirits came flooding back. She caught herself humming--and checked herself reproachfully. She caught herself singing--and lowered it to humming. She caught herself whistling--and decided that she might as well be cheerful while she waited for fate to befriend her and Jack. And she found that she thought about him none the less steadfastly for thinking hopefully.

Battle Field put no more restraint upon its young women than it put upon its young men--and it put no restraint upon the young men. In theory and practice it was democratic, American, western--an outgrowth of that pioneer life in which the men and the women had fought and toiled and enjoyed, side by side, in absolute equality, with absolute freedom of association. It recognized that its students had been brought up in the free, simple, frank way, that all came from a region where individualism was a religion, with self-reliance as the cardinal principle of faith and self-development as the goal.

There were no dormitories at Battle Field then. Olivia and Pauline lived in one of the hundred or more boarding-houses--a big, square, white "frame," kept by a Mrs. Trent, the widow of a "hero of two wars."

Her hero had won her with his uniform when he returned from the Mexican War. His conduct was so irregular and his income so uncertain that it had been a relief to her when he departed for his second war. From it he had brought home a broken constitution, a maimed body and confirmed habits of shiftlessness and drunkenness. His country took his character and his health and paid him in exchange a pension which just about kept him in whisky and tobacco. So long as he was alive Mrs. Trent hated him as vigorously as her Christianity permitted. When he was safely in his grave she canonized him; she put his picture and his sword, belt and epaulets in the conspicuous place in the parlor; she used his record for gallantry to get herself social position and a place of honor at public gatherings.

Her house stood back from the highway in a grove of elms and walnuts. Its angularity was relieved by a porch with a flat roof that had a railing about it and served as a balcony for the second-story lodgers. There were broad halls through the middle of the house down-stairs and up. Olivia and Pauline had the three large rooms in the second story on the south side. They used the front room as a study and Pauline's bedroom was next to it.

Late one afternoon she was seated at the study window watching a cherry-red sun drop through the purple haze of the autumn. She became conscious that some one was on the balcony before the window of the front room across the hall. She leaned so that she could see without being seen. Sharp against the darkening sky was the profile of a young man. Olivia joined her and followed her glance. The profile remained fixed and the two girls watched it, fascinated. It certainly was a powerful outline, proud and stern, but with a mouth that was sweet in its kindliness and gentleness.

"I wonder what he's thinking about," said Olivia, in an undertone; he was not fifteen feet from them. "I suppose, some scheme for conquering the world."

Most of Battle Field's youth came from the farms of that western country, the young men with bodies and brains that were strong but awkward. Almost all were working their way through--as were not a few of the women. They felt that life was a large, serious business impatiently waiting for them to come and attend to it in a large, serious way better than it had ever been attended to before. They studied hard; they practised oratory and debating. Their talk was of history and philosophy, religion and politics. They slept little; they thought--or tried to think--even more than they talked.

At a glance this man was one of them, a fine type.

"He's handsome, isn't he?" said Pauline.

"But--" She did not finish; indeed it was not clear to her what the rest of her protest was. He reminded her of Dumont--there was the same look of superiority, of the "born to lead." But his face seemed to, have some quality which Dumont's lacked--or was it only the idealizing effect of the open sky and the evening light?

When the bell rang for supper he apparently did not hear it. The two girls went down and had talked to the others a few minutes and all had seated themselves before he entered. An inch or so above six feet, powerful in the chest and shoulders, he moved with a large grace until he became self-conscious or approached the, by comparison, frail pieces of furniture. He had penetrating, candid eyes that looked dark in the gaslight but were steel-blue. His face now wore the typical western-American expression--shrewd, easy-going good humor. Mrs. Trent, intrenched in state behind a huge, silver-plated coffee-urn with ivory-trimmed faucet, introduced him--Mr. Scarborough--to Olivia, to Pauline, to Sadie McIntosh, to Pierson and Howe and Thiebaud (pronounced Cay-bo). Scarborough sat directly opposite Olivia. But whenever he lifted his eyes from his plate he looked at Pauline, who was next to her. When she caught him he blushed and stirred in his chair so uneasily that it creaked and crackled; and his normal difficulties with his large hands and the small knife and fork were distressingly increased.

Pauline was disappointed in him--his clothes were ill-fitting and gave him the appearance of being in danger of bursting from them; his hair was too long, suggesting a shaggy, tawny mane; though his hands were well-shaped they had the recent scars of hard manual labor. Thus, when Olivia spoke enthusiastically of him after supper, she made no reply. She would have been ashamed to acknowledge the reasons for her lack of admiration, even had she been conscious of them.

But the next morning at breakfast she revised her opinion somewhat. He talked, and he had a remarkable voice--clear, musical, with a quality which made it seem to penetrate through all the nerves instead of through the auditory nerve only. Further, he talked straight to Pauline, without embarrassment and with a quaint, satiric humor. She was forgetting for the moment his almost uncouth hair and dress when, in making a sweeping gesture, he upset a glass of water and sent a plate of hot bread flying from the waitress' hand.

"He'd do well in the open air," thought she, "but he's out of place in a house."

Still, she found him interesting and original. And he persistently sought her--his persistence was little short of heroism in view of the never-wholly-concealed sufferings which the contrast between her grace and style and his lack of both caused him.

"He looks like a king who had been kidnapped as a child and brought up in the wilds," said Olivia. "I wonder who he is."

"I'll ask him," replied Pauline. And Olivia was slyly amused by her cousin's unconscious pride in her power with this large, untamed person.

III.

AND SCARBOROUGH.

His name was Hampden Scarborough and he came from a farm about twenty miles east of Saint X. He was descended from men who had learned to hate kings in Holland in the sixteenth century, had learned to despise them in England in the seventeenth century, had learned to laugh at them in America in the eighteenth century, had learned to exalt themselves into kings--the kings of the new democracy--in the free West in the nineteenth century.

When any one asked his father, Bladen Scarborough, who the family ancestors were, Bladen usually did not answer at all. It was his habit thus to treat a question he did not fancy, and, if the question was repeated, to supplement silence with a piercing look from under his aggressive eyebrows. But sometimes he would answer it. Once, for example, he looked coldly at the man who, with a covert sneer, had asked it, said, "You're impudent, sir. You insinuate I'm not enough by myself to command your consideration," and struck him a staggering blow across the mouth. Again--he was in a playful mood that day and the questioner was a woman--he replied, "I'm descended from murderers, ma'am--murderers."

And in a sense it was the truth.

In 1568 the Scarboroughs were seated obscurely in an east county of England. They were tenant farmers on the estates of the Earl of Ashford and had been strongly infected with "leveling" ideas by the refugees then fleeing to England to escape the fury of continental prince and priest. John Scarborough was trudging along the highway with his sister Kate. On horseback came Aubrey Walton, youngest son of the Earl of Ashford. He admired the rosy, pretty face of Kate Scarborough. He dismounted and, without so much as a glance at her brother, put his arm round her. John snatched her free. Young Walton, all amazement and wrath at the hind who did not appreciate the favor he was condescending to bestow upon a humble maiden, ripped out an insult and drew his sword. John wrenched it from him and ran it through his body.

That night, with four gold pieces in his pocket, John Scarborough left England in a smuggler and was presently fighting Philip of Spain in the army of the Dutch people.

In 1653 Zachariah Scarborough, great grandson of the preceding, was a soldier in Cromwell's army. On the night of April twentieth he was in an ale-house off Fleet Street with three brother officers. That day Cromwell had driven out Parliament and had dissolved the Council of State. Three of the officers were of Cromwell's party; the fourth, Captain Zachariah Scarborough, was a "leveler"--a hater of kings, a Dutch-bred pioneer of Dutch-bred democracy. The discussion began hot--and they poured ale on it.

"He's a tyrant!" shouted Zachariah Scarborough, bringing his huge fist down on the table and upsetting a mug. "He has set up for king. Down with all kings, say I! His head must come off!"

At this knives were drawn, and when Zachariah Scarborough staggered into the darkness of filthy Fleet Street with a cut down his cheek from temple to jaw-bone, his knife was dripping the life of a cousin of Ireton's.

He fled to the Virginia plantations and drifted thence to North Carolina.

His great-grandson, Gaston Scarborough, was one of Marion's men in his boyhood--a fierce spirit made arrogant by isolated freedom, where every man of character owned his land and could conceive of no superior between him and Almighty God. One autumn day in 1794 Gaston was out shooting with his youngest brother, John, their father's favorite. Gaston's gun was caught by a creeper, was torn from him; and his hand, reaching for it, exploded the charge into his brother's neck. His brother fell backward into the swamp and disappeared.

Gaston plunged into the wilderness--to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Indiana.

"And it's my turn," said Hampden Scarborough as he ended a brief recital of the ancestral murders which Pauline had drawn from him--they were out for a walk together.

"Your turn?" she inquired.

"Yes--I'm the great-grandson--the only one. It's always a great-grandson."

"You DO look dangerous," said Pauline, and the smile and the glance she sent with the words might have been misunderstood by a young man entertaining the ideas which were then filling that young man's brain.

Again, he told her how he had been sent to college--she was always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories.

Ever since he could remember, his strongest passion had been for books, for reading. Before he was born the wilderness was subdued and the cruel toil of his parents' early life was mitigated by the growth of towns, the spread of civilization. There was a chance for some leisure, for the higher gratification of the intense American passion for education. A small library had sprung up in one corner of the general room of the old farm-house--from the seeds of a Bible, an almanac, Milton's Paradise Lost, Baxter's Saint's Rest and a Government report on cattle. But the art collection had stood still for years--a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, another of the Emancipation Proclamation, pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Napoleon, the last held in that household second only to Washington in all history as a "leveler."

The only daughter, Arabella, had been sent to boarding-school in Cincinnati. She married a rich man, lived in the city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and class and rank. She talked feelingly of the "lower classes" and of the duty of the "upper class" toward them. Her "goings-on" created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind. As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense," and started out to feed the pigs. The best terms Hampden's mother could make were that he should not be disinherited and cast off if he went to Battle Field and paid his own way.

He did not tell Pauline all of this, nor did he repeat to her the conversation between himself and his father a few days before he left home.

"Is 'Bella going to pay your way through?" asked his father, looking at him severely--but he looked severely at every one except Hampden's gentle-voiced mother.

"No, sir." The son's voice was clear.

"Is your mother?"

"No, sir."

"Have you got money put by?"

"Four hundred dollars."

"Is that enough?"

"It'll give me time for a long look around."

The old man drew a big, rusty pocketbook from the inside pocket of the old-fashioned, flowered-velvet waistcoat he wore even when he fed the pigs. He counted out upon his knee ten one-hundred-dollar bills. He held them toward his son. "That'll have to do you," he said. "That's all you'll get."

"No, thank you," replied Hampden. "I wish no favors from anybody."

"You've earned it over and above your keep," retorted his father. "It belongs to you."

"If I need it I'll send for it," said Hampden, that being the easiest way quickly to end the matter.

But he did tell Pauline that he purposed to pay his own way through college.

"My father has a notion," said he, "that the things one works for and earns are the only things worth having. And I think one can't begin to act on that notion too early. If one is trying to get an education, why not an all-round education, instead of only lessons out of books?"

From that moment Pauline ceased to regard dress or any other external feature as a factor in her estimate of Hampden Scarborough.

"But your plan might make a man too late in getting a start--some men, at least," she suggested.

"A start--for what?" he asked.

"For fame or fortune or success of any kind."

Scarborough's eyes, fixed on the distance, had a curious look in them--he was again exactly like that first view she had had of him.

"But suppose one isn't after any of those things," he said. "Suppose he thinks of life as simply an opportunity for self-development. He starts at it when he's born, and the more of it he does the more he has to do. And--he can't possibly fail, and every moment is a triumph--and----" He came back from his excursion and smiled apologetically at her.

But she was evidently interested.

"Don't you think a man ought to have ambition?" she asked. She was thinking of her lover and his audacious schemes for making himself powerful.

"Oh--a man is what he is. Ambition means so many different things."

"But shouldn't you like to be rich and famous and--all that?"

"It depends----" Scarborough felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant. So he changed the subject. "Just now my ambition is to get off that zoology condition."

IV.

A DUMONT TRIUMPH.

But in the first week of her second month Pauline's interest in her surroundings vanished. She was corresponding with Jennie Atwater and Jennie began to write of Dumont--he had returned to Saint X; Caroline Sylvester, of Cleveland, was visiting his mother; it was all but certain that Jack and Caroline would marry. "Her people want it," Jennie went on--she pretended to believe that Jack and Pauline had given each the other up--"and Jack's father is determined on it. They're together morning, noon and evening. She's really very swell, though _I_ don't think she's such a raving beauty." Following this came the Saint X News-Bulletin with a broad hint that the engagement was about to be announced.

"It's ridiculously false," said Pauline to herself; but she tossed for hours each night, trying to soothe the sick pain in her heart. And while she scouted the possibility of losing him, she was for the first time entertaining it--a cloud in the great horizon of her faith in the future; a small cloud, but black and bold against the blue. And she had no suspicion that he had returned from Chicago deliberately to raise that cloud.

A few days later another letter from Jennie, full of gossip about Jack and Caroline, a News-Bulletin with a long article about Caroline, ending with an even broader hint of her approaching marriage--and Dumont sent Pauline a note from the hotel in Villeneuve, five miles from Battle Field: "I must see you. Do not deny me. It means everything to both of us--what I want to say to you." And he asked her to meet him in the little park in Battle Field on the bank of the river where no one but the factory hands and their families ever went, and they only in the evenings. The hour he fixed was ten the next morning, and she "cut" ancient history and was there. As he advanced to meet her she thought she had never before appreciated how handsome he was, how distinguished-looking--perfectly her ideal of what a man should be, especially in that important, and at Battle Field neglected, matter, dress.

She was without practice in indirection, but she successfully hid her jealousy and her fears, though his manner was making their taunts and threats desperately real. He seemed depressed and gloomy; he would not look at her; he shook hands with her almost coldly, though they had not seen each other for weeks, had not talked together for months. She felt faint, and her thoughts were like flocks of circling, croaking crows.

"Polly," he began, when they were in the secluded corner of the park, "father wants me to get married. He's in a rage at your father for treating me so harshly. He wants me to marry a girl who's visiting us. He's always at me about it, making all sorts of promises and threats. Her father's in the same business that we are, and----"

He glanced at her to note the effect of his words. She had drawn her tall figure to its full height, and her cheeks were flushed and her eyes curiously bright. He had stabbed straight and deep into the heart of her weakness, but also into the heart of her pride.

The only effect of his thrust that was visible to him put him in a panic. "Don't--PLEASE don't look that way, Polly," he went on hastily. "You don't see what I'm driving at yet. I didn't mean that I'd marry her, or think of it. There isn't anybody but you. There couldn't be, you know that."

"Why did you tell me, then?" she asked haughtily.

"Because--I had to begin somewhere. Polly, I'm going away, going abroad. And I'm not to see you for--for I don't know how long--and--we must be married!"

She looked at him in a daze.

"We can cross on the ferry at half-past ten," he went on. "You see that house--the white one?" He pointed to the other bank of the river where a white cottage shrank among the trees not far from a little church. "Mr. Barker lives there--you must have heard of him. He's married scores and hundreds of couples from this side. And we can be back here at half-past eleven--twelve at the latest."

She shook her head expressed, not determination, only doubt.

"I can't, Jack," she said. "They----"

"Then you aren't certain you're ever going to marry me," he interrupted bitterly. "You don't mean what you promised me. You care more for them than you do for me. You don't really care for me at all."

"You don't believe that," she protested, her eyes and her mind on the little white cottage. "You couldn't--you know me too well."

"Then there's no reason why we shouldn't get married. Don't we belong to each other now? Why should we refuse to stand up and say so?"

That seemed unanswerable--a perfect excuse for doing what she wished to do. For the little white cottage fascinated her--how she did long to be sure of him! And she felt so free, so absolutely her own mistress in these new surroundings, where no one attempted to exercise authority over another.